5 ms·

Maybe Jason Calacanis isn't being totally honest about Mahalo?

78 points by dazz 16y ago

jamesshamenski 16y ago
Google is probably making a lot of money off of Mahalo. Anyone want to take a stab at what that number could be?
- travem 16y ago
  Probably more than they make of Knol :-)
josefresco 16y ago
Why this crusade against Mahalo/Calacanis? Why isn't this sort of critique aimed at Google, who is after all indexing and profiting off of sites like (and much worse than) Mahalo. I find all these posts interesting, but it seems Jason is being portrayed as the most at fault. Isn't he just playing the Google 'game' better than most? When I see SPAM in Google's index that is ranking high I don't get mad at the spammers but rather at Google for allowing and often times making huge money off of SPAM they index.
- martythemaniak 16y ago
  I'd say Google hasn't done it's part either, but people may be taking some schadenfreude at the fact that Calacanis sells himself as a hard-headed, tech-driven entrepreneur, when in fact he is an asshole and a spammer.
- mvandemar 16y ago
  This is very much a critique against Google, but more towards the pass that they keep giving Jason. Jason is most definitely not playing the game better than most, and in fact his violations of Google's quality guidelines are in many cases way more blatant than other spam sites, and are definitely more high profile... yet for some odd reason Google refuses to penalize them. Other sites belonging to honest webmasters get penalized on a daily basis, yet Jason appears to be immune.
  - olefoo 16y ago
    I think this is an object lesson in the value of social skills and conference going. I doubt that Calacanis would be able to keep this circus going if he hadn't cultivated some excellent relationships inside Google. I can't really blame the Googlers involved; it's hard to knowingly wreck the business of someone who's been a good friend, even if you know they deserve it.
- benologist 16y ago
  I've never understood this either. Google pretty much funds all the spam, if they had and enforced stronger policies on AdSense it would cripple spammers and made-for-ads crap. You can report bad sites and people abusing AdSense but nothing ever happens. I wonder if anyone actually gets the reports at all - I reported a site I came across several weeks ago for perfectly aligning every block of ads with sets of images to disguise them as content, obviously nobody from Google's even clicked the link because they're still doing it and it's an immediately obvious violation.
euroclydon 16y ago
I wonder how much money Google is making off the Mahalo domain?
rit 16y ago
This obsession with Calacanis/Mahalo is becoming a Hacker News tic along the lines of the reddit obsession with Bacon/Narwhals/Keanu Reeves. Most of the content is regurgitated as well. If you have such an issue with Mahalo and/or Mr. Calacanis: STOP PAYING ATTENTION TO THEM. Nothing dooms a site to the shadows of history like being completely and utterly forgotten.
- jeremymcanally 16y ago
  That would be great if Google would forget them. Occasionally I'll search for something and see a Mahalo page that seems to have at least a pointer to what I need, when in reality I'm just inundated with AdSense and the content that seemed to be there either isn't anymore or never was (i.e., it was a crappily autogenerated page that has an intro paragraph seemingly from someone's blog or something with no link or other content). The idea is great (curated knowledge could be a boon for consumers and producers), but I think the way they're doing it sucks.
  - axod 16y ago
    Doesn't Google have a feature: [x] Never show me any more results from foo.com I hate that site. Remember my preference. If not, it should do.
    - nailer 16y ago
      Alas people who visit Mahalo for no other reason than Jason's linkfarm directed their search their may not hate the site, although the person running the site with real content does.
      - jcalacanis 16y ago
        Take a look at the how to play guitar chords page... it's everything you would want if you did that search. people stay on that page for 20-60 minutes!!! and there are 50 people on that page all the time learning to play guitar chords. sorry it's not how to set up a cassandra cluster, but it is of value to people learning to do something basic. best jcal
bobbyi 16y ago
I don't understand how the author can say that there aren't coupons on those coupon pages. Apparently since the coupons are from an affiliate program with Savings.com they don't count. When I go to the "1800Pools Coupons" page that he linked, the main content box has an offer for "$25 off Orders Over $500" . When I click on this, it tells me that the coupon code is "AFF25" and can be added during checkout on the 1800Pools website. http://www.mahalo.com/1800pools-coupons http://www.mahalo.com/1800pools-coupons Where's the problem? Isn't that exactly what someone who searched on google for "1800pools coupons" is looking for?
- mvandemar 16y ago
  Savings.com != Mahalo.com. There is no reason to rank Mahalo... if that is the site being looked for then rank Savings.com instead. It is what is known as a "thin affiliate" site, and it adds a layer of navigation to the user and middleman payouts to the advertiser, lowering user experience and driving up advertiser costs.
  - bobbyi 16y ago
    But Savings.com isn't "the site being looked for". The user has never heard of Savings.com and doesn't care about them. They user is looking for coupon codes and they are listed clearly on the Mahalo landing page. The point of an affiliate program is to let other people distribute the coupons, so it's not as if he is doing something shady by "scraping" content from elsewhere as the article implies. I do agree that he is violating AdSense rules and shouldn't have the AdSense boxes on those pages, but (correct me if I'm wrong) Matt Cutts isn't involved in AdSense and is just focussed on indexing, so that's not the issue at hand when the author is attacking him.
  - mvandemar 16y ago
    re: But Savings.com isn't "the site being looked for". Yes, it is, the searcher doesn't know that though. That's Google's job, to rank the most relevant sites to the query. If those coupons are what the user is looking for then that site is what should come up first. I also want to add that at this moment Savings.com does indeed outrank Mahalo.com for that query. While this may change (and based on past experience with Mahalo's empty pages many of them will outrank other sites that are higher quality eventually), that is not what the bulk of the issue is. Those Savings.com feeds are not "human powered" anything. They are exactly the kinds of pages that Jason told Matt Cutts he had removed from his site. They are the antithesis of what Jason claimed his site was all about just 4 days ago. That's the main issue.
jister 16y ago
I thought this issue was long gone? Can we just move on please?
jasonmcalacanis 16y ago
Let's talk about something more interesting: 1. Open Angel Forum has gotten a dozen startups funded. 2. Open Angel Forum is now in eight cities, and will be in San Francisco this Thursday. 3. The Launch Conference next winter will be a platform for 30-50 startups to launch AND raise their seed/A-rounds. These SEO attacks are absurd at this point... I may be outspoken, but this is a slam job done by a group of SEOs who have it out for me. It's sad that they can take over HackerNews so easily.
- dasil003 16y ago
  There's no conspiracy, the facts speak for themselves. I admire your tenacity in responding to these posts, but you've had a bit too much of your own koolaid. Mahalo doesn't pass the smell test, period.
- ashu 16y ago
  As a completely independent observer having no stakes in this game, I think that the facts absolutely don't point this way. None of your "arguments" has explicitly refuted the attacks. All refutations have been shown (with proof) to be invalid. Finally, it just does not seem like all that plastered excessive AdSense is doing the Internet any good at all. What value are you providing there, exactly? If those are just pages which don't get much traffic, you could just remove the AdSense from there and the world will thank you for it.
  - cmatthias 16y ago
    I'd like to echo ashu's comments; I have no skin in the SEO game and Mahalo doesn't pass the smell test for me. There might be a bias on HN against you or your site, but if you want to change that, it's your job to argue with solid facts that can't be refuted with a 5 minute Google search. The fact that you're trying to completely change the subject with your post about the Open Angel Forum doesn't really help your cause, either.
- axod 16y ago
  Do you really hold up the pages you post from Mahalo as a shining beacon of something you want to be known for? Pages full of auto-generated content and ads which you have managed to get Google to index? I'd understand if you were desperate for cash and needed the adsense revenue, but surely it'd be better to create a site that has some sort of quality content that you can be proud of? Ignore the "SEO Attacks" stuff. * You automatically create pages with no real content * You plaster them with ads * You get them indexed by Google That doesn't seem to me to be something good for the web.
ddemchuk 16y ago
The simple matter here is that people should not be attacking Mahalo because of their "spam" or whatever else you think they're doing. If you want to attack them, you should also be ripping apart all the results for the front page results for viagra, weight loss, acne, etc. All they're doing is taking advantage of Google's weaknesses. If you use Google on a daily basis, which the majority of us do, but their results are not the high quality you're expecting them to be, why the hell would you be getting mad at the results showing up instead of the site serving up the results? Everyone needs to lay off and start criticizing Google if anything.

78 points by dazz 16y ago

jamesshamenski 16y ago

Google is probably making a lot of money off of Mahalo. Anyone want to take a stab at what that number could be?

travem 16y ago
Probably more than they make of Knol :-)

josefresco 16y ago

Why this crusade against Mahalo/Calacanis? Why isn't this sort of critique aimed at Google, who is after all indexing and profiting off of sites like (and much worse than) Mahalo. I find all these posts interesting, but it seems Jason is being portrayed as the most at fault. Isn't he just playing the Google 'game' better than most? When I see SPAM in Google's index that is ranking high I don't get mad at the spammers but rather at Google for allowing and often times making huge money off of SPAM they index.

martythemaniak 16y ago
I'd say Google hasn't done it's part either, but people may be taking some schadenfreude at the fact that Calacanis sells himself as a hard-headed, tech-driven entrepreneur, when in fact he is an asshole and a spammer.
mvandemar 16y ago
This is very much a critique against Google, but more towards the pass that they keep giving Jason. Jason is most definitely not playing the game better than most, and in fact his violations of Google's quality guidelines are in many cases way more blatant than other spam sites, and are definitely more high profile... yet for some odd reason Google refuses to penalize them. Other sites belonging to honest webmasters get penalized on a daily basis, yet Jason appears to be immune.
- olefoo 16y ago
  I think this is an object lesson in the value of social skills and conference going. I doubt that Calacanis would be able to keep this circus going if he hadn't cultivated some excellent relationships inside Google. I can't really blame the Googlers involved; it's hard to knowingly wreck the business of someone who's been a good friend, even if you know they deserve it.
benologist 16y ago
I've never understood this either. Google pretty much funds all the spam, if they had and enforced stronger policies on AdSense it would cripple spammers and made-for-ads crap. You can report bad sites and people abusing AdSense but nothing ever happens. I wonder if anyone actually gets the reports at all - I reported a site I came across several weeks ago for perfectly aligning every block of ads with sets of images to disguise them as content, obviously nobody from Google's even clicked the link because they're still doing it and it's an immediately obvious violation.

euroclydon 16y ago

I wonder how much money Google is making off the Mahalo domain?

rit 16y ago

This obsession with Calacanis/Mahalo is becoming a Hacker News tic along the lines of the reddit obsession with Bacon/Narwhals/Keanu Reeves. Most of the content is regurgitated as well. If you have such an issue with Mahalo and/or Mr. Calacanis: STOP PAYING ATTENTION TO THEM. Nothing dooms a site to the shadows of history like being completely and utterly forgotten.

jeremymcanally 16y ago
That would be great if Google would forget them. Occasionally I'll search for something and see a Mahalo page that seems to have at least a pointer to what I need, when in reality I'm just inundated with AdSense and the content that seemed to be there either isn't anymore or never was (i.e., it was a crappily autogenerated page that has an intro paragraph seemingly from someone's blog or something with no link or other content). The idea is great (curated knowledge could be a boon for consumers and producers), but I think the way they're doing it sucks.
- axod 16y ago
  Doesn't Google have a feature: [x] Never show me any more results from foo.com I hate that site. Remember my preference. If not, it should do.
  - nailer 16y ago
    Alas people who visit Mahalo for no other reason than Jason's linkfarm directed their search their may not hate the site, although the person running the site with real content does.
    - jcalacanis 16y ago
      Take a look at the how to play guitar chords page... it's everything you would want if you did that search. people stay on that page for 20-60 minutes!!! and there are 50 people on that page all the time learning to play guitar chords. sorry it's not how to set up a cassandra cluster, but it is of value to people learning to do something basic. best jcal

bobbyi 16y ago

I don't understand how the author can say that there aren't coupons on those coupon pages. Apparently since the coupons are from an affiliate program with Savings.com they don't count. When I go to the "1800Pools Coupons" page that he linked, the main content box has an offer for "$25 off Orders Over $500" . When I click on this, it tells me that the coupon code is "AFF25" and can be added during checkout on the 1800Pools website. http://www.mahalo.com/1800pools-coupons http://www.mahalo.com/1800pools-coupons Where's the problem? Isn't that exactly what someone who searched on google for "1800pools coupons" is looking for?

mvandemar 16y ago
Savings.com != Mahalo.com. There is no reason to rank Mahalo... if that is the site being looked for then rank Savings.com instead. It is what is known as a "thin affiliate" site, and it adds a layer of navigation to the user and middleman payouts to the advertiser, lowering user experience and driving up advertiser costs.
- bobbyi 16y ago
  But Savings.com isn't "the site being looked for". The user has never heard of Savings.com and doesn't care about them. They user is looking for coupon codes and they are listed clearly on the Mahalo landing page. The point of an affiliate program is to let other people distribute the coupons, so it's not as if he is doing something shady by "scraping" content from elsewhere as the article implies. I do agree that he is violating AdSense rules and shouldn't have the AdSense boxes on those pages, but (correct me if I'm wrong) Matt Cutts isn't involved in AdSense and is just focussed on indexing, so that's not the issue at hand when the author is attacking him.
- mvandemar 16y ago
  re: But Savings.com isn't "the site being looked for". Yes, it is, the searcher doesn't know that though. That's Google's job, to rank the most relevant sites to the query. If those coupons are what the user is looking for then that site is what should come up first. I also want to add that at this moment Savings.com does indeed outrank Mahalo.com for that query. While this may change (and based on past experience with Mahalo's empty pages many of them will outrank other sites that are higher quality eventually), that is not what the bulk of the issue is. Those Savings.com feeds are not "human powered" anything. They are exactly the kinds of pages that Jason told Matt Cutts he had removed from his site. They are the antithesis of what Jason claimed his site was all about just 4 days ago. That's the main issue.

jister 16y ago

I thought this issue was long gone? Can we just move on please?

jasonmcalacanis 16y ago

Let's talk about something more interesting: 1. Open Angel Forum has gotten a dozen startups funded. 2. Open Angel Forum is now in eight cities, and will be in San Francisco this Thursday. 3. The Launch Conference next winter will be a platform for 30-50 startups to launch AND raise their seed/A-rounds. These SEO attacks are absurd at this point... I may be outspoken, but this is a slam job done by a group of SEOs who have it out for me. It's sad that they can take over HackerNews so easily.

dasil003 16y ago
There's no conspiracy, the facts speak for themselves. I admire your tenacity in responding to these posts, but you've had a bit too much of your own koolaid. Mahalo doesn't pass the smell test, period.
ashu 16y ago
As a completely independent observer having no stakes in this game, I think that the facts absolutely don't point this way. None of your "arguments" has explicitly refuted the attacks. All refutations have been shown (with proof) to be invalid. Finally, it just does not seem like all that plastered excessive AdSense is doing the Internet any good at all. What value are you providing there, exactly? If those are just pages which don't get much traffic, you could just remove the AdSense from there and the world will thank you for it.
- cmatthias 16y ago
  I'd like to echo ashu's comments; I have no skin in the SEO game and Mahalo doesn't pass the smell test for me. There might be a bias on HN against you or your site, but if you want to change that, it's your job to argue with solid facts that can't be refuted with a 5 minute Google search. The fact that you're trying to completely change the subject with your post about the Open Angel Forum doesn't really help your cause, either.
axod 16y ago
Do you really hold up the pages you post from Mahalo as a shining beacon of something you want to be known for? Pages full of auto-generated content and ads which you have managed to get Google to index? I'd understand if you were desperate for cash and needed the adsense revenue, but surely it'd be better to create a site that has some sort of quality content that you can be proud of? Ignore the "SEO Attacks" stuff. * You automatically create pages with no real content * You plaster them with ads * You get them indexed by Google That doesn't seem to me to be something good for the web.

ddemchuk 16y ago

The simple matter here is that people should not be attacking Mahalo because of their "spam" or whatever else you think they're doing. If you want to attack them, you should also be ripping apart all the results for the front page results for viagra, weight loss, acne, etc. All they're doing is taking advantage of Google's weaknesses. If you use Google on a daily basis, which the majority of us do, but their results are not the high quality you're expecting them to be, why the hell would you be getting mad at the results showing up instead of the site serving up the results? Everyone needs to lay off and start criticizing Google if anything.